Author Archives: eehines

An Additional Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors took notice of President Donald Trump’s (R) waiver of the Jones Act, which mandates sea shipments of goods between American ports be done by American-built, -owned, and -crewed ships. The waiver has been a resounding success during the disruptions of the Iran war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. From this, the editors suggested that

if the Trump Administration thinks its waiver is helping oil supply during the Hormuz crisis, why not make that success permanent by repealing the Jones Act?

That’s an excellent suggestion, and it’s bolstered by a much more cogent rationale, as well, peripherally touched on by the editors. The purpose of the Jones Act when it was enacted was to stimulate American shipbuilding. It’s only necessary to observe Trump’s lately effort to push a hard acceleration in building dual use cargo ships to both expand our commercial shipping fleet in competition with the People’s Republic of China’s burgeoning commercial fleets and to facilitate the Navy’s ability to move supplies, equipment, and reinforcements around the world into combat areas. In all those years since this law was passed, there has been zero growth in our shipbuilding capability.

It’s past time to rescind the Jones Act.

He’s Right

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But not in the way he thinks. Joe Calvello, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdami’s Press Secretary, said this:

That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken.

“That” was referring to Ken Griffin, his high-value secondary home in New York City, and his supposed failure to pay a deliberately, cynically undefined “fair share” of taxes. After all, Calvello says that the tax system “rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink….”

“The tax system,” the city’s, the State’s, and the nation’s are, indeed, broken. The fix, though, is not to constantly raise taxes on those Evil Rich like Griffin. The fix is something so inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats, including Mamdani, that they can’t even say the words: lower tax rates on the middle class and poor, and more broadly, restructure the tax system and its taxing targets so that those middle class and poor pay the same low tax rates on the same things as the Evil Rich do.

Pick One, Ace

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Ex-President Barack Obama (D) had this to say on the Supreme Court’s nearly total elimination of racist racial gerrymandering with its Louisiana v Callais ruling:

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

Our voting rules can explicitly favor one group of American voters over other groups of American voters, which favoring can come only at the direct expense of those others, explicitly deprecating those voters’ votes as such favoritism does.

Or our voting rules can, finally, recognize that all American voters are just that—American voters—and so entirely equal under law, even voting law.

As Obama said as the Democratic Party’s keynote speaker at its 2004 National Convention,

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

That includes voters in America.

This sort of duplicity is all too typical of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

The PRC’s Economic Arsenal

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The People’s Republic of China is stepping up its economic war on us, adding additional weapons to its arsenal. Those weapons include

a blacklist for foreign firms it deems hostile, a law authorizing punishment of any company that helps enforce U.S. sanctions on Chinese targets, a rule ordering Chinese parties to ignore those sanctions outright, and expanded powers for its antitrust regulators to kill cross-border merger deals on national-security grounds.

Two responses come to mind. One is that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss and controlling shareholder, should simply ignore the PRC’s order to unwind its acquisition of Manus. Meta should, instead, proceed with what it has already collected via Manus. The unwinding is strictly a matter between Manus and its government masters. To the extent the PRC then takes economic or legal action against Meta, that should finally demonstrate even to Zuckerberg the lack of utility in doing any sort of business within the PRC.

The other response is that all the players should proceed as though the PRC’s threat to sue or its actual suing have no effect. Such suits, occurring as they will within PRC courts, can have no effect outside the PRC’s borders. In the event the PRC then acts against those intermediate businesses with operations inside the PRC, see above.

No Records Kept

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Minnesota has a process whereby prospective voters lacking identification or proof of residency

can bypass the requirements by having another registered voter from the same precinct vouch for the voter wanting to register or signing a proof-of-residence oath in front of an election judge, which is attached to the voter’s registration application.

America First Legal filed FOIA requests with the State’s Secretary of State seeking documentation regarding those completed vouchers, and the State’s SecState answered No data responsive. At all.

Records? We ain’t got no records. We don’t have to show you any stinking records.

This is Minnesota actively permitting anyone to vote, citizen or not, legally present or not, in the State’s elections and in the State’s national-level elections.